Natural selection cannot create an actual observer. It's a physical impossibility unless you want to go back to dualism. The brain evolved the capacity to appear as though it is a limited self observing an exterior world because this perspective is so favoured. The behaviour of selfhood is favoured.
The mouse probably doesn't have the brain to articulate itself as an observer. But its brain can I'm sure amplify certain processing streams over others according to it's programming for survival. Thus it behaves as a self observing danger.
Why can't natural selection create and observer? I don't quite understand your reasoning, here. Let me present my thoughts on the symmetry of the observer.
The observer in my imagination has a scale symmetry. The observer is self similar. If you look closely at a physical system like an observer, it is made up of smaller units that has similar features to the observer as a whole.
An observer is a bit like a hologram. The brain works a bit like a hologram. One can partially reconstruct a hologram using one fragment of the hologram.
You are claiming that natural selection can't create a system that has self similarity. You are saying that a brain can't arise from natural selection because each piece has to be built separately by natural selection.
If that is what you are saying, then you are wrong. Random, unconscious nature seems to many systems that are self similar. Any process that makes such systems involves feed back loops. Manganese dendrites have self similar invariance. Our blood vessels have self similarity. Turbulent fluids have self similarity.
Natural selection can be defined as a feed back loop. Yes, systems can be set up like nested dolls. A fractal system can be an observer. Every part of that fractal observer can be an observer.
The mouse is an 'observer' even if it can't articulate itself as an observer. It can observe a light every bit as much as a man observes a light. The memory of the light is repeated in different parts of the mouses brain.
The ability to copy information again and again on a fractal system is part of observation. In quantum Darwinism, the copying process defines the observation. The decoherence comes about exactly because the observer is really plural. Every observer is a fractal collection of smaller observer.
The brain is a typical observer because it is fractal. I think it is more valid to say that the brain may act as more than one observer. I really think one part of the brain can observe another part of the brain.
This is in fact unavoidable because the brain is huge.. The nerve cell is a finite speed of propagation. There is a time delay at each synapse. There are thousands, maybe millions, of miles of nerve cell in the human brain. The distance from one end of the skull to the other is significant. The brain involves separate sections that work in parallel. So 'awareness' has no unity.
Consciousness does not exist on short time scales. This has been studied by neurologists for some time. The processing of a stimulus takes place in layers. People start responding to a stimulus long before they are 'aware' of it.
It takes at least four seconds for someone to be conscious of an impulse stimulus. The spinal cord makes the arm jerk away from a painful event. However, the 'person' isn't 'consciously' aware of it even though the arm has moved away. They won't say they are aware of it until the signal has gone through a large number of synapses.
I propose that what a physicist calls an 'observer' is even less than the spinal cord. A physicists says that the fire is observed even while the nerve impulse is moving toward the spinal cord.
Natural selection made the nerve endings, the spinal cord, and the synapses that appear in the brain. The consciousness is really just the responses in the higher part of the brain. So natural selection made all the observers that are in the brain.
Fractal patterns evolve because these patterns help a gene survive. By survive, I mean that the gene makes copies of itself. Not all the copies are exact. However, the information gets copied again and again. So a collection of genes is an observer in the physics sense.
A population of genes can be an observer in the physics sense. Natural selection is the observation. The same information is copied onto different genes. Genes that have certain information are fit. Unfit genes aren't copied.
So maybe the 'observer' refers to any self similar system of interacting fields or particles.
